Australian rental yields: houses vs units

It is one of the most consistent patterns in Australian property: in the same city, a unit almost always shows a higher gross rental yield than a house. The reason is not that units command more rent — they usually command less — but that unit prices have grown far more slowly than house prices over the past decade, so the rent-to-price ratio stays higher.

Houses, meanwhile, are the growth play: more land, stronger long-run appreciation, lower yield. This is the yield-versus-growth trade-off in its most everyday Australian form.

Indicative gross yield ranges across the four biggest capitals, houses versus units:

Three forces open the house-versus-unit yield gap:

A unit's gross-yield lead shrinks — sometimes disappears — once you get to net yield. Strata levies are the big one: they can run into thousands of dollars a year and fund things a house owner pays for separately or not at all.

So the decision is rarely “which has the higher yield?” It is: do you want the unit's stronger income now, or the house's stronger growth later? Our yield versus capital growth guide works through exactly that call.

How much of each city even is units shapes how many opportunities you will find. This is live from our ABS Census data — the share of dwellings that are units versus houses/townhouses, by capital.

Sydney and Melbourne carry the deepest unit markets, which is exactly where the yield-focused, unit-buying strategy has the most stock to choose from.